Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Ph.D.
Transfronteriza, rasquache y nepantlera
Bio
AKA. Mystic Machete, Dr. Machete . . .
I am a first-generation artist, curator, writer, and scholar from the Tijuana-San Ysidro border region. I make it my mission to push forth the decolonial option by customizing and hacking as many formats as possible including writing, speaking, producing documentary films, making new media art, art curation (some as live, interactive, immersive transborder rasquache artistic interventions), archiving, and compiling open-access archives and repositories. All my projects intentionally seek to stray away from required expectations or formulas favorited by coloniality. The ongoing technological contributions of minoritized epistemologies have been and continue to be often “overseen” by the limited perspective of Eurocentric modernity. Instead, I highlight the existence of the various iterations (versions) of what I see is a Chicana/o/x “Mestiza” Indigenous spectrum of wisdom by using multiple media tools and technology to make others see, feel, and experience examples of our culturally-specific individual and collective spaces of memory and existence beyond coloniality.
With a transfronteriza (perpetual border-crossing) consciousness, I liken prevailing notions of research, media, and technology to a yonke (junkyard) from which I repurpose elements to free think and amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice. My new media artwork has been exhibited and showcased by international venues and organizations such as the ARS Electronica festival, the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo), ACM SIGGRAPH, University for the Creative Arts (UK), the Guizhou Provincial Museum (China), the Hunan Museum (China), The Centre for Digital Media (Canada), The García Center for the Arts (San Bernardino, CA), PAMLA Arts Matter of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Human Resources Gallery (Los Angeles), and soon in the forthcoming exhibition Digital Capture: Southern California and the Origins of the Pixel-Based Image World at UCR ARTS and part of the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time (PST) Art x Science x LA.
I have organized and curated over 14 community-centered multimedia artivism and critical intervention performances and art exhibitions. In 2022 I curated the first transborder decolonial international digital new media art show The Future Past v. Coloniality: Decolonial Media Art Beyond 530 Years which opened in Daegu, South Korea during the SIGGRAPH Asia conference with a second showing at the 2023 Los Angeles ACM SIGGRAPH conference. Currently, I am working on a community-centered exhibition Momuments to the Pluriverse showcasing VR world making in the style of Xicanx Transfronteriza Immersive Muralism, a new media art formula I was credited with creating in the 2023 ACM SIGGRAPH Autodesk Time Tunnel exhibiting 50 years of groundbreaking work in computer graphics. As part of the 2024 PST programming, this exhibition will be hosted between UCR and CSUSB.
Currently, I am working on a monograph on the transmedia literary and US mass media archetypical representations of the border city of Tijuana which proposes the existences of a divergent Baja border aesthetics and links it to its deep and organic participation in the decolonial option. My writing has appeared in Critical Storytelling from Global Borderlands: En la línea, Vol. 8, 2022 (Brill Publishers), Re-Activating Critical Thinking amidst Necropolitical Realities: Politics, Theory, Arts and Political Economy for a Radical Change, 2022 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, 2022 (The University of Arizona Press), Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 3 Vol. 10, 2021 (UC Press), and Journal of Latinos in Education Vol. 20, 2018 (Taylor and Francis).
I am Associate Professor for Decolonizing Media and Communication Studies at CSU San Bernardino, a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee, a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Underrepresented Travel Grant Committee, and co-founder/co-director of the CSUSB Women of Color in Academia Institute.
